A little history: handheld LCD games

A calculator on a train

The late 1970s. Nintendo engineer Gunpei Yokoi is riding a bullet train and notices a fellow passenger, a businessman, idly pressing the buttons of a calculator. Calculators had just become pocket-sized: a segment LCD screen (like ours), a button-cell battery lasting months, a tiny chip inside. Yokoi thought: what if the same case held a small game — to pass the time on the way? And in the pauses it would show the time.

Game & Watch

That is how the Game & Watch series was born. The first one was Ball (April 1980): a juggler tosses balls and you keep them from falling. All the screen can do is pre-drawn segments: a figure doesn't "move", it lights up in one of several positions — exactly like our astronaut. Hence the recognisable style: jerky but very crisp, with faint "ghosts" of the unlit segments.

From 1980 to 1991 about 60 games came out in the series and over 40 million units were sold. Game & Watch introduced the cross-shaped D-pad (in the Donkey Kong version, 1982) — later inherited by every game console. And the two-screen "books" (Multi Screen) were echoed more than twenty years later in the Nintendo DS.

"Nu, Pogodi!"

In the USSR in 1984 the "Elektronika IM-02" came out — "Nu, Pogodi!" ("Just You Wait!"): the Wolf catches eggs from four chutes, and the Hare sometimes peeks out of a window. The game repeated the mechanics of the Game & Watch "Egg" — and became perhaps the best-known handheld game in the country. Our "Star Harvest" descends from exactly this mechanic: four pipes, four poses, catch.

What the real ones have inside

Inside a Game & Watch there is not a heap of gates but a 4-bit microcontroller from Sharp's SM5 family (a tiny processor with its program in ROM) and an LCD driver. In chapter 2 we build the same kind of game without a processor — only gates and flip-flops, to see every part of the mechanics in hardware. The next step — building a small processor and rewriting the game as a program, the way Nintendo's engineers did — is a big topic of its own, and it gets a separate kit.

Game & Watch is a trademark of Nintendo. This kit is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo; the name is mentioned to tell the story of the genre. The game "Star Harvest" and all the kit pictures are our own.